Drive only 25 miles from downtown headquarters to San Pedro and find the earliest history of the District.

The Fort MacArthur Military Museum hearkens back a century or more to the age of rocky breakwaters, wooden barracks and mortar batteries—all built by the Corps.

Fort Mac’s lower, middle and upper “reservations” take you on a trip back through time to an era when engineering work was done with pick-and-shovel brawn and mule-drawn carts. In the man-made march to create a peacetime port and wartime fort, Los Angeles District people stood in the forefront at every stage.

Corps engineers designed and oversaw operations, from the first spadeful of overturned swamp mud to the tapping of a gold telegraph key by President William McKinley, which was supposed to release the first barge-full of rock for San Pedro’s breakwater. (It failed, and the task wound up being done by hand.)

As for the fort, its original defensive structures were built so well by Corps contractors that they have outlasted others erected decades later during World War II. “By 1919, construction had been completed on Fort MacArthur’s main armament of four 14-inch rifles mounted on ingenious ‘disappearing carriages’ and eight 12-inch mortars mounted in massive concrete emplacements,” says a newsletter distributed by the Fort MacArthur Museum Assn. “These guns could protect the Los Angeles Harbor and had a range of up to 14 miles.”

The gun batteries that sit atop the 130-acre Upper Reservation, known today as Angel’s Gate Park, comprise the only example in the U.S. of a Taft Period fortification (named for the then-Secretary of War, later President, and built by the Corps beginning in 1915); the Battery Osgood-Farley Historic Site is the best preserved in the continental U.S. and is listed in the Register of National Historic Places.

And, as at a dozen other past or present LA District sites, several movies have been filmed on the Upper Rez, including Midway, Patton, Private Benjamin and Pearl Harbor. (During World War II, a young captain named Ronald Reagan also spent a lot of time on the Rez making Army propaganda films.)

Recently, District Public Affairs Chief Dr. Fred-Otto Egeler donated a black cloth scrapbook containing scores of vintage photographs recording the Corps’ construction of Fort MacArthur. (It also contains photos of Fort Rosecrans, built by the Corps at Point Loma, near San Diego.) He presented the ancient album to Joe Janesic, vice president and a board member of the museum association.

Janesic, a homegrown volunteer who has made the museum his life’s work (“The day I got my driver’s license I borrowed a car and drove out here—and it seems like I’ve never left”) waxed euphoric about the photograph album. “I showed it to LTC David Appel, who is an engineering expert with the California National Guard, and he about freaked,” Janesic wrote in an e-mail. “We both can’t get over what a great collection this is and how it has led to such a greater understanding of the building process of the batteries here. There are pictures in this book that show views of the facility that were never before imagined.”

The photo album will be preserved and the black-and-white photos digitalized by the museum archive to use in displays and research.

Founded in 1986, the museum traces the history of Fort MacArthur from its creation in 1888 as the San Pedro Military Reservation, to its use as a U.S. Army Engineering Reservation in 1910, supporting the Corps’ construction work on the federal breakwater, to the fort’s official establishment in 1914, and finally to the end of the NIKE Air Defense program and the fort’s retirement as an independent facility in 1982.

Without the Corps of Engineers, Fort MacArthur (named after Douglas’s father, Arthur, a three-star general who served as commander of the Dept. of the Pacific in the early 1900s at the end of his career) literally wouldn’t exist. “In the years before 1935 the Los Angeles District primarily engaged in the development of harbors along the coast, military construction [the emplacement of seacoast artillery], and a certain amount of investigative and exploratory work,” Dr. Anthony Turhollow wrote in his 1965 District history. “The major achievement of LAD was the creation of the largest man-made harbor in the world, Los Angeles, out of swamp and overflow land crossed by various meandering sloughs around Wilmington and San Pedro.”

Battery Barlow-Saxon, with its eight 12-inch mortars, was protected by a 14-foot-deep concrete roof and by inner walls 1 to 2 yards thick. Batteries Osgood-Farley, Leary and Miriam bristled with 14-inch rifles behind walls ranging from 12 to 30 feet thick. Their doors were made from the same armored plates as those used on battleships of the period.

Everything on the Rez loomed larger than life. The cannon were 55 feet long, sitting on 60-ton gun carriages, and their 1,600-pound shells could be delivered 15 miles away—Catalina Island was just outside striking distance. “When they went off,” Janesic says, “it was the equivalent of a 3.2 earthquake. (The vibrations and sound waves) broke windows in the community, knocked homes off their foundations, flattened buildings on the coast. Residents took the U.S. government to court to make them stop firing the guns.”

After Pearl Harbor, coastal defense gun crews hastened to Fort Mac to man the batteries. They had to live in underground tunnels for up to a month; the guns were manned and ready for action 24 hours a day. Thanks to two huge water cisterns and stockpiles of food, the coastal defenders could have sustained themselves for six months without outside contact or supplies.

Not long after the U.S. declared war Dec. 8, 1941, military engineers also strung an antisubmarine net at the Port of LA’s breakwater; it was made of surplus cable from the Golden Gate Bridge.

By 1943, Fort Mac had become one of the largest induction centers in the U.S. Some 750,000 men were processed into the Army—including numerous Hollywood performers who’d been drafted. Some notable examples: Jimmy Stewart, Robert Mitchum and Mickey Rooney.

COL William Hicks, the wartime commander of the fort, began to capitalize on their star power and expertise to produce training and propaganda films and to provide entertainment for the troops. One such vignette was a musical, “Hey, Rookie,” with soldiers in every role.

“What do Winnie the Pooh and the U.S. military have in common?” Janesic always asks of people taking the Rez tour with him. His answer: Sterling Holloway. The actor whose gentle tremolo later became Pooh’s voice was a member of that all-soldier musical troupe.

One of Fort Mac’s lingering mysteries is the tunnels. Among the first of America’s urban legends, the rumor of a subterranean latticework persists to this day. The tour guide has heard them all—reports of a tunnel to White Point in San Pedro, to Catalina Island, to San Diego. The legends do have a basis in fact: Beneath Fort Mac’s rolling hills snakes an estimated mile-long tunnel network, shored up by wooden beams.

Earlier this year experts from the National Parks Service entered the system and penetrated about 300 feet before bad air forced their withdrawal. “The tunnel system was the brainchild of a COL Schnell, the wartime executive officer of the fort, who had served at Fort Mills on Corregidor Island in the Philippines during the 1930s,” Janesic relates. “He saw how a similar tunnel system built there before the war was saving the lives of the island’s defenders during the Japanese siege of Manila.”

After World War II ended, all of Fort Mac’s guns were cut up and sold for scrap. Thousands of pounds of gunpowder were dumped in trenches and torched.

In the 1950s, however, a whole new breed of weapon began to be deployed on the peninsula. For the next quarter-century, Fort MacArthur was part of the NIKE surface-to-air missile defense system. At its peak in 1960, the fort oversaw 18 missile launch sites around southern California.

In the mid-‘70s, Pentagon planners declared the NIKE system obsolete, and in 1974 they declared Fort Mac “surplus property.” The Upper and Lower Rez were then deeded to the city of Los Angeles; the Middle Reservation (now called the Lower) was transferred to the U.S. Air Force.

By then, of course, the Corps and the Los Angeles District had shifted their own priorities—to flood control and later to environmental restoration.

But the ghosts of Fort Mac remain. And thousands of annual visitors stroll through the old batteries and smell the same musty air breathed by men who long ago defended the beautiful but vulnerable coast.

You can see relics of some of the best work your Corps predecessors have ever done—a legacy (in the words of the son of Fort MacArthur’s namesake) of their sense of duty, honor, country.